4 research outputs found
A symbolic-connectionist model of relation learning and visual reasoning
Humans regularly reason from visual information, engaging in simple
object search in a scene to abstract mathematical thinking. In recent decades,
the field of machine learning has extensively focused on visual tasks with the
aim to model human visual reasoning. However, machine learning approaches
still do not match human performance on simple visual tasks such as the
Synthetic Visual Reasoning Test (SVRT; Fleuret et al. 2011). While this set of
tasks is trivial for humans to solve, the current state-of-the-art machine learning
algorithms struggle with the SVRT.
We argue that the reason for the difference in human reasoning and
machinesâ performance in the SVRT is the ways humans and machines
represent the world and visual information specifically. We argue that humans
represent situations in terms of relations between constituent objects, and that
our representation of these relations is structured and symbolic. By
consequence, humans engage in operations that are not available for machine
systems that rely on non-structured representations. We hold that operations
over structured relational representations is what underlie phenomena such as
abstract visual reasoning and cross-domain generalisation.
The current work builds on the DORA (Discovery Of Relations by
Analogy; Doumas et al., 2008; 2022) model of relation learning. DORA learns
structured representations of magnitude relations from simple visual inputs.
Here we expand the model to learn more complex categorical relations (e.g.,
contains or supports) as compressions of simpler relations (e.g., above, in-contact), and develop a new method for identifying relevant relations over which
to perform reasoning from simple scenes. We embed the resulting model in a
pipeline for human visual reasoning consisting of successful psychological
models of object recognition and analogy making. The result is an end-to-end
system which is constrained as much as possible by what is known about the
processes and mechanisms of the cognitive systemâfrom early vision to
learning complex relations and reasoning.
The model is tested within the context of the SVRT. The limitations of
the model and the directions for future research are discussed
Making probabilistic relational categories learnable
Kittur, Hummel and Holyoak (2004) showed that people have great difficulty learning relation-based categories with a probabilistic (i.e., family resemblance) structure. In Experiment 1, we investigated interventions hypothesized to facilitate learning family-resemblance relational categories. Changing the description of the task from learning about categories to choosing the âwinningâ object in each stimulus had the greatest impact on subjectsâ ability to learn probabilistic relation-based categories. Experiment 2 tested two hypotheses about how the âwhoâs winningâ task works. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that the task invokes a âwinningâ schema that encourages learners to discover a higher-order relation that remains invariant over members of a category. Experiment 3 reinforced and further clarified the nature of this effect. Together, our findings suggest that people learn relational concepts by a process of intersection discovery akin to schema induction, and that any task that encourages people to discover a higher-order relation that remains invariant over members of a category will facilitate the learning of putatively probabilistic relational concepts